The Mysterious Killing of a JFK Mistress / Mary Meyer may have known about the president's assassination

A VERY PRIVATE WOMAN

In the early '60s Mary Meyer was a frequent White House guest.
Secret Service
logs reveal she often visited President
John F. Kennedy
when his wife, Jackie, was away. The enigmatic beauty dined and slept with the president, but she was more than just a playmate.

Bright, hip and cheerful, the abstract painter enjoyed a deep friendship with Kennedy. Her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was a top CIA official. Her brother-in-law, Ben Bradlee, was one of Washington's rising journalistic stars. Divorced, she lived in a townhouse on 34th Street in Georgetown. Her two teenage sons were off at boarding school.

Meyer died two days short of her 44th birthday -- gunned down on the canal towpath near Georgetown while she was taking her customary walk at noon. Her death on Oct. 12, 1964, came two weeks after the Warren Commission report was issued and 11 months after Kennedy was assassinated.

Nina Burleigh's investigative portrait of Meyer is a superbly crafted, evocative glimpse of an adventurous spirit whose grisly murder remains a mystery. "She had short blond hair, full lips, and blue eyes quick to see humor. . . . She usually passed for at least a decade younger," Burleigh writes. "She wore manners and charm like a second skin, but there was a reserve to her as well.

"Few people got beyond her outer self to see the inner Mary. She was complicated," Burleigh writes. "She wanted freedom and personal authority, but she lived in a time when society distrusted those qualities in women. Men gave her entree to smoke-filled parties where conversation was vivid and the presence of power quickened her blood."

Burleigh captures the milieu of the nation's capital in the 1960s -- its cold warriors toiling in secrecy and consumed by "the soul-deadening pursuit of power" -- along with Georgetown's avant-garde and "the glamorous playpen of the White House."

"Sexual adventurousness was part of the Georgetown style," she writes. "Its denizens viewed themselves as morally sophisticated and European, in contrast to the Eisenhower Republicans."

A former White House corre spondent for Time magazine, Burleigh attracted some attention this year when she wrote a story for Mirabella magazine that playfully touted her attraction to President Clinton. In "A Very Private Woman" she takes a less sensational path. Her book includes a slew of footnotes disclosing the public records and interviews she relied on.

Meyer, from the prominent Pinchot family of Pennsylvania, was high on the A-list for Camelot's parties, where she was known for her throaty laughter and easy rendition of Chubby Checkers' new dance, the Twist.

"She had endured some unfulfilling years as a suburban CIA wife and embarked on an odyssey of escape," Burleigh writes. "An extramarital fling with the president of the United States was part of her awakening. With her short blond hair, dark glasses, and pedal pushers, she was a bit like Jean Seberg in "Breathless," a well- bred ingenue out looking for fun and getting into trouble along the way. Mary Meyer was a risk taker." On the afternoon of her death, two mechanics working on a stalled Rambler on Canal Road heard a woman's screams and her last words, "Someone help me" -- and gunshots. One mechanic, who dared to look over a stone wall at the wooded area below, saw a black man leaning over the prone body of a woman.

Ray Crump Jr., a 25-year-old laborer, was arrested near the murder scene. Police dredged the canal's murky depths, but no weapon was found. Crump was charged with murder, but a jury acquitted him due to insufficient evidence. In later years he was arrested and convicted of several arsons and assaults.

But the presidential mistress' execution-style death -- one bullet to her head, another to her upper torso -- raised eyebrows.

Some of Meyer's friends doubted she was the victim of random violence. They suspected she was slain because she knew too much, that Kennedy and others in power had "told her things." Others theorized that Crump was lured to the site as a fall guy.

Meyer's death triggered a desperate search for her personal diary and letters. Meyer's closest friends and family knew of her involvement with Kennedy and feared that her papers would end up in the hands of scandalmongers.

Bradlee, then Newsweek magazine's bureau chief, turned Meyer's diary over to a friend of the Meyer family, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA counterintelligence chief, for safe-keeping. Several years later Angleton gave it to Meyer's sister, Tony Bradlee, who reportedly burned it. Angleton, a connoisseur of Washington's secrets, later boasted that he had bugged Meyer's telephone and bedroom.

Angleton was the CIA's liaison to the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was Kennedy's lone assassin and didn't mention the ties between the CIA, the Mafia, the Kennedy administration and assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. A CIA official later testified to the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Angleton, who was stationed in Sicily in World War II, had Mafia ties. Angleton died of lung cancer in 1986.

The late journalist Jim Truitt sold a story to the National Enquirer in 1976 that detailed his friend Mary Meyer's romance with Kennedy and described how the nonchalant, bohemian artist had smoked pot with the president in July 1962 -- a few months before the Cuban missile crisis.

Meyer befriended psychedelic guru Timothy Leary, who wrote in his autobiography that Meyer and other prominent Washington women had decided to "turn on" the nation's powerful men as a way to promote world peace. But it is unclear whether Meyer introduced the president to LSD.

In the months before she died, Meyer complained that an intruder had repeatedly broken into her home. One conspiracy theorist -- author and self-described former CIA contractor Robert Morrow -- wrote that two weeks before her death Meyer told a friend that she knew that CIA-affiliated Cuban exiles and the Mafia had conspired to kill Kennedy.

Burleigh treads cautiously through this "never-ending vortex of conspiracy," brushing aside theories as "rife with holes." But inevitably, given the unique circumstances of Meyer's remarkable life and sudden death, the author raises more questions than she can ever hope to answer.